Peace in the Face of War

It was particularly hard for children. Nelly Pozner said:
I lay in bed, too weak to move, with the most terrible feeling of being
unneeded, redundant, useless. As I understand it, happiness is the sense of
being wanted, of being of use to others. During the siege I suffered greatly
because I felt I was of no use to anyone.
Yet in her state of suffering, Nelly discovered her own inner resources:
When the hunger became unbearable, I would tell myself that one day there
would be water and sweets and the cinema again. In my mind I would re-run
all the shows I had seen at the children’s theatre. Then I would revisit the
palaces my grandmother had shown me before the war – Pavlovsk, Peterhof,
Oranienbaum… in my mind I would slide along their floors, through their
galleries, in the felt slippers they gave you to protect the parquet.
Faced with a stark choice, Leningraders discovered deep spiritual resources
within themselves. Alexander Boldyrev, an orientalist at the Hermitage
Museum, wrote in his diary that:
…death sucks one towards it like a current beneath a narrow bridge. As
soon as you lower your guard you have to redouble your efforts to escape it.
His diary 1 became his lifeline. He wrote that as the siege wore on he began to
realise its significance. It was more important to him than all his other work:
…it would be more than a miserable record of food consumed, more than
a death rattle, it would be a truthful witness to the time... And there arises
in my mind’s eye an undreamed of pleasure: a study, warm and light. Alive,
well-fed, clean and calm, I sit and write. All horrors are in the past. Siege
Notes are about the past and in the past. The diary is finished, and I am
preparing it for others to read.
This was written on 15 th December 1942. The siege had still another year
to run, but Boldyrev’s spirit was already vaulting over the horrors. The
Hermitage Museum managed to evacuate two thirds of its collection by train
to shelters in the Ural mountains. Most of the staff not mobilised to fight,
stayed. Two thousand men and women lived in the museum’s basement
shelters; they gave lectures, wrote papers. When not on fire-watch duty, they
spent their time sharing all they knew with each other, the older with the
younger, so that their expertise would not die with them. They said it helped
them bear their hunger.
1
‘Osadnaya Zapis’ [Siege Notes], Alexander Boldyrev, published posthumously, Yevropaiskiy Dom,
St Ptersburg, 1998.
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